Solzynitsin
Solzynitsin
In 1978, the audience in Cambridge Massachusetts, at Harvard Universitys commencement speech, was being addressed by an esteemed writer and thinker named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Coming from Communist Russia, many people were expecting a speech praising Western values, ideals, and accomplishments. However, what Sol came to say, was anything but a praise of Western Civilization. He proceeded to warn Westerners about the demise of our society that stemmed from our diluted ideals and virtues that we have come to rely on so greatly. In his speech entitled “A World Split Apart,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn relates many downfalls of the “common society” to many topics we are discussing this semester in the Development of Western Civilization.
One of the topics that had particular relevance to Solzhenitsyns speech was the idea of existentialism. Existentialists were advocates of free will and said that we were the product of our choices. We are responsible for our individual choices, and the product of those choices, the existentialists preached, makes up the complete human person. Soren Kierkegaard, a very influential existentialist also has relevance to Solzhenitsyns speech. The individual is subject to an enormous burden of responsibility, for upon his or her existential choices hangs his or her eternal salvation or damnation. “Kierkegaards central problem was how to become a Christian in Christendom. The task was most difficult for the well-educated, since prevailing educational and cultural institutions tended to produce stereotyped members of “the crowd” rather than to allow individuals to discover their own unique identities” (www.plato.stanford.edu). Sol talks about this a great deal in his speech as he is a huge advocate for individual advancement versus the “crowd” mentality. In Eastern Europe, mostly in Communist Russia, social identities were fluid, meaning everyone was considered the same, but in the West there is a huge opportunity for advancement that we all take for granted.
Sol touches on the topic of courage quite early in his speech. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today” (A World Split Apart, pg. 2). In the twentieth century, more than any other period in history, the realization that evil was present became clear. The Holocaust and Stalinist Russia made people in Eastern Europe who experienced them hardened to the harsh realities that were commonplace in their lives. Only courage and hope would allow the human person to reach its full potential.